(Today, incidentally, marks eleven years since the USSR closed up shop and the hammer & sickle fluttered down from over the Kremlin for the last time.) As a newbie here I was gratified and frankly astonished at the average level of civility and conscious thought exhibited in the responses to this thread. No one--no one at all, as far as I could see--took up the easy red-baiting cudgel (a long-discredited rhetorical technique that each generation seems to reinvent anew, marveling at its self-evident efficacy as a crushing riposte), and even the most trenchant rejoinders appeared to be delivered with a welcome want of hysteria. You guys are a classy bunch.
cordially,